I don't think it's exactly fair to make a crack at the competence level of Ubuntu users. I've used a large number of Linux distros. Arch, Arc, Slackware, Mandrake, Mandriva, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, Debian, Pyrolinux, Goblinx, DSL, and I'm sure a dozen others.
I happen to like Ubuntu. I can compile from source if I want, and as a programmer I'm no stranger to the CLI. i don't know why your friend can't compile from source, all an Ubuntu user has to do for most cases is install the build-essential package.
I'd like to spend more time using my computer than administrating it. I fall completely in line with Jef Raskin's philosophies. The computer is the tool I use to accomplish tasks. The computer is to information as a toaster is to toast. One shouldn't need any understanding of electrical engineering to have breakfast. If that's your thing, enjoy it, but the rest of the world's breakfast isn't any lesser because they don't truly know how their toaster works.
I was sort of interested in helping them boost the download stats, but due to the mismanagement of this event I've mostly lost interest. When I woke up this morning I expected it to be available but it wasn't. By 10am there was still no real official word as to when this whole shindig was supposed to take place. If you're going to have an event, it would be good to give people advance notice as to when it begins. I didn't even know when it starts until 45 minutes after it began. Now trying to download, it's obvious they weren't even prepared for it because the page is down.
Because I'm using Linux (Ubuntu) it's more convenient for me to wait until the most recent version is in the repositories, I'm not going to sit around and hope their download page starts working.
I agree with you that the claims by Iron Port are highly suspect. They determined online pharmacies have a 100% error rate? I know people who have ordered from online pharmacies, chemically tested their drugs, and got exactly what they ordered. Obviously I can only speak of the handful of incidents I'm aware of, so maybe the people I know just got real lucky.
If online pharmacies screwed people 100% of the time, nobody at all would buy from them, because in a game like that the big money is in repeat orders. It wouldn't make any economic sense to score some petty cash with a bunch of first time orders when you can milk the same cow 100 times.
I'm not advocating the use of these pharmacies, I just don't think Iron Port's report is credible. To believe them means that online pharmacies never ship the correct order, and anything which makes an "always" or "never" claim raises red flags and requires close scrutiny.
I completely disagree. Leadership requires specialization in its own areas of knowledge, most of which can be summed up under the label of metacognition. Surrounding oneself with well-informed advisors only requires you be able to reliably gauge other people's metacognitive ability. If you're not the best at x, you need to know someone who's the best at x, and if you don't, all you need to know is someone who can tell you who the best at x is. If you're wrong, the process has a very fast feedback loop because your critics will quickly illuminate you on how routinely poor your decisions and appointees are.
Of course that assumes you don't insulate yourself with sycophants which makes the entire process a moot point because an egotistical person who's only interested in hearing good things about himself really has no interest in being a good leader anyway, only in hearing that he's a good leader.
After enough failed ventures, all those little failures start to add up. Someday it'll dawn on them they're in Bankruptcy/Reorganization mode. They can only dawdle so long before there's really nothing left for them to do but close the doors. It wasn't so long ago that nobody imagined IBM, SGI, or Sun Microsystems would ever have any trouble. The problem with having a big company is that you passively bleed out your resources faster than a small company would. It requires big successes just to maintain the current size. If they don't choose a direction soon, they're going to stop making any gains at all and shareholders will not be happy about it.
Even if the profit margin isn't greater than 50% (or 20% on other products), they still gain market share or at least an opportunity to retain a significant portion of their market share.
The reason good data is hard to find online is chiefly a problem with perspective and the models we are using to differentiate good data from bad data. That model primarily relies on the idea that it's all about numbers, or simply that more data is the same as better data. Whenever we come up with bad data, the "quantity model" dictates we just need a larger sample.
This model is directly related to how companies measure TV show quality. The theory is, the more people who watch a show, the better that show must be. This model is so obviously faulty; almost everyone can agree that American Idol isn't even in the same qualitative ballpark as The X-Files, Arrested Development, or Star Trek. The reason the model is faulty is because of the hugely limited scope of the examination. There are a number of variable factors that aren't being considered, such as people own more TVs than when Star Trek was on, and they're mistaking curios interest with enjoyment. Average person will stop and watch a car wreck for roughly the same amount of time they'll play with a yo-yo, that doesn't mean the entertainment value of each is directly comparable, there's a whole different brain process going on in the observers of each, but the model of measuring quantities assumes that two activities which consume the same amount of time are equivalent in all ways.
Back to internet statistics. All this data mining and gathering is designed to ignore the differences in activities, it's only cataloging information for the purpose of what's the same. As the article states, Alexa is always checking for biases. Well the biggest bias in this model is the assumption "in sufficient quantity, all things are interchangeable." It's the assumption that telemarketers and scammers work on, which is why so many people go broke buying into those schemes, because they buy into an assumption which is absolutely wrong.
Many internet business models, specifically data miners, are designed on, assume that 1 million hits is the same regardless of where it comes from. When you consider real factors, having 1 million people see your hand-made chain pouches at a shopping mall is not going to generate the same level of interest as having 1 million people see them at a renaissance fair.
Of course that introduces a whole different problem with assumptions about targeting (I'm not going to get into that, only state that targeted marketing makes the assumption that timing doesn't matter).
In conclusion, you can't play people as a numbers games, People's behaviors (including their online behaviors) are complex and any model which treats people's differences as a child might divide up a bag of skittles by color is going to have a very high error rate.
"That said, today we have things like Second Life. I suppose what's more disturbing to me about that trend is not the lack of technology, but the centralization of control..."
Becauase of centralized control and proprietary software, things like Second Life don't seem like a successor to VRML. Prospectively, VRML rendering would have been built-in to modern web browsers, you wouldn't need to use an external client. Things like Viscape and 3DML made the "virtual web" seem like it was only months away. I was really excited when National Geographic made a 3D SVR universe web page, which I believe is still available even though the viewer is difficult to get working and is Windows/IE only. Granted, most of the functionality can be done with Flash, but we still have the same weakness with Flash that it's always had, it's just an image so the content isn't indexed. Anyway, there are many reasons I wouldn't consider Second Life a VRML successor.
"Downloading is less convenient."
Downloaded is only less convenient if you don't have to worry about resources being unavailable when you want them. If YouTube, Veoh, et. al. goes down for maintenance or other reasons, videos are unavailable. Flash video compared to downloaded video is like comparing on-demand movie channels to DVDs. Yes, it would be nice if the videos you wanted were perpetually available on-demand. Unfortunately the availability of video content is at the provider's whim. When sites like NBC decide to publish content, whether or not I can watch it at any given moment is not up to me, an episode they provided yesterday they can remove today. I don't necessarily download for higher quality, I download to secure resources for when I want to use them, and use them in the way I want. With flash video, what controls are available to a video is up to the content provider. If they decide a video can't be paused, played in slow motion, or sped up, there's nothing to be done about that.
Bittorrent is nice, but the epitome of inconvenience. It's great for popular resources, but it can be miserable and downright impossible to get something which only a small number of people are interested in.
Don't you mean 2018?
No, I was hasty when posting to digg that I was looking forward to 2018. Upon further thought, I've decided it'll be at least 2050 before computers will change in any significant way. My main concern is that the content and models of the internet aren't advancing nearly as rapidly as the computer resources powering them. The power of our computers are leaps and bounds ahead of 1998. And with all this power the main distractions seem to be "casual games" (rehashed ATARI or NES games) and viral videos (read: any stupid thing anyone has ever done, but recorded for distribution). It's to be expected I guess. Give 1000 people Star Trek technology and you'll have a line of 999 people outside the holodeck trying to live their ultimate sexual fantasy.
If people had told me 10 years ago that this was about as far as we'd get with the internet in a decade, I really wouldn't have believed them. As much as I hear about all the huge advances in technology, I always ponder the 320x240 pixelated screens of YouTube and remember that it's what people consider 10 years more advanced than what we had in 1998. And in 1998 we had VRML with people announcing that we were on the verge of the internet being a 3-Dimensional landscape. We also had 320x240 pixelated video, but I thought that was just temporary.
I remember watching South Park on RealPlayer G2. Now instead of it being an application, it's even more pixelated and embedded directly in a web page, just in case downloading content was too convenient.
Flickr's progress has been to strip down the size and length of videos.
I can't wait for 2050. By then, we'll have reduced clips down to 3 seconds that you can only watch in a 16x16 thumbnail. And as the "Web M" Trend (It won't be hip to use numbers anymore for internet "versions"), all the coolest companies won't have any vowels at all. Hooray progress!
This crap has to come to a halt. Not just Comcast's antics, but ISPs in general. If an ISP is going to block ports, traffic shape, or otherwise impose restrictions on internet connections, they should be required to advertise those restrictions more prominently than the features of the service.
It's not right to bury restrictions on page 30 of a TOS agreement. If you're going to advertise your service as 50 times faster than a dial-up connection or advertise "blazing speeds" and low prices, they should also be required to advertise their service's restrictions just as prominently or more so.
The same thing goes for "unlimited bandwidth". If they're going to advertise unlimited bandwidth, they should never be able to cite excessive usage as a reason to cut someone off.
Our world should not be run by marketing and PR people. "Liar" should not be a viable career path.
It was nothing but a bunch of softball questions answered with corporately loyal rhetoric. The whole thing can be summed up:
He was a blogger for Microsoft and whose job it was to report news about Windows Vista's superior functionality. Every experience he had was great, challenging, and emotionally rewarding.
I don't like spin, and that's all this "interview" is. I'm not in the market for any bridges or swampland.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap. However, when that same population is scoured for the resources to oppress them the method pays for itself. Keeping the Chinese population ignorant of their government's workings keeps the wheels turning.
Imagine keeping a worker in a basement turning a wheel that powers your house. If you use the energy he generates to power a lock on the door, and use a portion of that power to keep him from getting any information on how to quit working, the system pays for itself.
The Chinese people make incredible innovations, their labors lead to powerful technological developments. Those technologies are then used to keep the Chinese people from escaping their societal prison.
I don't deny that Generation Y workers can provide value. The question is whether that value outweighs the detriments. The overwhelming sentiment among them is that "I won't be loyal to a company because it won't be loyal to me." or restated as "Me first." The problem I see with that attitude is that they project their own disloyalties onto the company. They're job hopping because they assume the company will dump them.
They can't understand that a company will actually be loyal to them because they don't stay long enough to enjoy having seniority. An entire career built around perpetually being "The New Guy". A good company will be loyal to you, especially for specialized skilled workers. The people who get screwed out of companies are (usually) middle management as their job functions often become blurred and overlaps with the administrative duties of top-tier production workers (For example, Project Leader vs. Lead Programmer). Engineers, developers, technicians, and any sort of production workers are usually the last ones to lose their job and that's only if the company is truly in dire straits.
Look at people like Andrew Koenig, Barbara E. Moo, Bjarne Stroustrup, and John Carmack. They've been loyal to their companies and the companies have rewarded them handsomely for it, allowing them to work with virtually any technology they want to. As a counter-example, look at John Romero. Brilliant guy, but his lack of loyalty and over-confidence in his abilities lead to failure. And that's where I see the majority of Generation Y workers headed, careers like John Romero's, except without ever hitting the high note. What a Generation Y worker "could" do or "might" bring to a company is meaningless if they're going to leave for a different company before any of it comes to fruition.
Generation Y workers have the potential to bring valuable ideas and contributions to a company, but they need to temper those ideas with a traditional work ethic so some of that potential turns into real value.
I wish it were just that DUIs were being documented and prosecuted more, but that's a fantasy. The numbers of crooked cops have not fallen, people today bribe their way out of tickets just as much as they have in the past. People of my generation didn't drink and drive. Growing up during the MADD era, we learned to call a cab. These days, drinking and driving among youth is a cool thing to do. They want to be like Paris Hilton. They do it because it's a peer thing, everyone else their age is doing it. People aren't getting prosecuted more, the bulk of the prison population are babyboomers.
The most unfortunate thing is that Generation Y drinks and drives because there's few consequences for it. They brag about how they got a couple of points on their license, but that doesn't actually stop them.
Are you seriously saying you feel some sort of entitlement to drink and drive? You're just annoyed that previous generations were able to evade the legal consequences? Thanks, I think you exemplify everything I said about your generation. Entitlement indeed.
I don't think the feelings of entitlement have anything to do with living through an economic crunch, which isn't that bad for Generation Y yet, and they certainly weren't raised in an economically disadvantaged world, they had more financial resources available to them than any previous generation. A recession is only beginning, and while they were busy setting up blogs they never considered what they could do to help the situation. They just think it's a problem for older people to fix, even though they're fully into adulthood now they still don't want to take an active role in fixing the problem.
The sense of entitlement I refer to has a lot to do with iPhones, laptops, and new cars. The latest greatest gadget is the bare minimum entrance fee. Young people today don't buy used cars, used cellphones, or used anything. It's gotta be top-notch and brand new. They don't buy replacement gadgets for broken ones, because they'll buy a new one long before their previous model breaks. A recent article written by Generation Y about frugal living involves $100 jeans and shopping at brand outlets.
I live in an apartment complex that's largely used for college housing, but I don't see anyone living like they're suffering financially. New cars, new clothes, stereo systems that take up an entire 12 foot wall, all while not being able to pay their rent or cover next semester's tuition.
Young people today are getting married before they even move out of their parents house. Married couples that don't even live together. And, in spite of abundant sex education, they're giving birth to their own children long before they ever think about a job or career. They think "parent" is a career path and don't know why the money isn't rushing in from their blog.
The latest Ivy League graduates are turning their diplomas into napkins as fast as the schools can issue them. Established professional companies don't like job hoppers, but Millenials don't want to work somewhere, they want to live a nomad lifestyle where they work as necessary, then quit their job to blog in a coffee bar, then try to find another job and wonder why no one will hire them even though they don't stay more than 6 months.
They feel entitled to show the world how drunk they can get, and then are completely perplexed when that racy Facebook photo bites them in the ass. It's no different than when someone before the internet would make a public spectacle of themselves at a bar and lose their job.
It's my belief it all stems from a childhood of "Everyone's Special, Everyone Wins". As children, they were imbued with too much self-esteem, which now has become narcissism.
Obviously there will be exceptions, but those are the generational traits, which are not the same as racial traits, because they can change their attitudes and behaviors. But they behave this way because it's emotionally rewarding for them.
Generations don't label themselves. You get labeled and usually that label is based on the most widespread opinions about the members of said generation.
Generation Y, Millenials, Generation Me... for over 150 years there's never been a clear distinction between one generation and the next. And you're not the first generation to be given a label you don't want. Generation labels have almost always been a derogatory term. Funny thing is that each generation does have certain characteristics. Like with Generation Me/Y/Millenials... an overwhelming sense of entitlement. Faster than anyone else, they get really annoyed when the world doesn't morph itself to meet their whims.
Consider the large number of people from your generation who play games and think that team killing is fun. They do it because THEY want to have fun, everyone else be damned because "Me" is all that's important. If they submit an article to Slashdot/Digg/Fark, they're infinitely annoyed if their article isn't chosen, somehow they feel entitled to be heard. This extends to blogs, they created them because they believe everything they think should be published material. They have unprecedented numbers of drunk drivers because they don't care who they endanger, all that matters is that "Me" has fun, They think every luxury in life is a right not a privilege. And they're annoyed that "Me" doesn't get to pick the generation label applied to them. If you join a voice chat with them, they're known to just sit there and sing loudly ignoring that there's 10 other people who actually don't want to hear their rendition of the latest emo band.
Their greatest ideas for the application of the internet was to get everyone swept up in an endless series of popularity contests. Egocentricity is the core concept for the "Social Web". Thanks for that.
Consider this term was applied to your generation because you have people like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Kevin Federline, and Lindsey Lohan as your spokespeople.
I've written a lot of code in my time. I've never written a routine/method/function that saved user account names and passwords then emailed them to myself. Writing passwords to the local system is fine, but even that you have to do correctly (in a sufficiently encrypted form) and you must notify the user. I can't understand how he could possibly justify creating emails that transmit password information as simply a debugging accident. The debugging process probably shouldn't involve automatically creating emails. And if it does, it probably shouldn't include secure information. And if it does, it probably shouldn't include secure information from the user without notifying them.
I don't think this can be justified. You can't "accidentally" harvest account names and passwords. Bells go off in the head when you're writing code that says "create an email, send it to this address, and include the current user's username and password."
From my observations, the main reason Linux users aren't gaming is because they're very smart. They're not easily entertained. They quickly break games down mentally into it broad groups of actions (even if subconsciously) and the repetitive nature of modern games becomes a thorn in their side very quickly. They want real tools to interact with game worlds, not the illusion of power.
As an example, in most modern MMOs, characters get weaker every time they gain a level (I'm not referencing a specific game here). At first level, you can kill something the same level as you in a few seconds. At 20th level it takes 2 minutes to kill a creature the same level as you. At 100th level it takes 10 minutes to kill something equal to your level. The fact that your abilities are labeled "Super Fireball IV" or "Giant Axe Chop VII" doesn't mask the fact that even if you're doing more numbered damage, the creatures have higher health relative to your ability, giving the feeling of actually getting weaker as the game tries to maintain the illusion of power with higher numbers and bigger explosions. When that's coupled with the repetitive nature of the game, in that every battle comes down to using the same abilities in the same order, it's not really a game so much as a finger exercise and it's about as fun as a typing tutor.
Ignoring MMOs, we have FPS games which haven't progressed any since Quake 1. Graphically, they're superior. Functionally they're the same. A bunch of identical people running around with really big guns. Network latency plays a huge role in FPS games, but it doesn't have to. If there were more strategic elements to the game the emphasis on split-second timing would be dramatically reduced. Intelligent people want more tools to interact with the world. They want their actions to alter the game environment. Blow a hole through a wall, deform the terrain with explosions, knock down trees... that's not even the most basic list of what a player should be able to do in a 3D game.
More damage, more muscular characters, bigger armor, larger explosions, and better graphics are all surface improvements over the previous generation of games. They raise the initial impression of a game, maybe sells more units, but they don't add replay value to a game. Intelligent people play a game repeatedly when it has something to offer them in terms of intellectual discovery. Finding new ways to use spells, equipment, and character abilities, interesting interactions with the games physics, those are things that appeal to players in the long term.
Linux users have a way of seeing through the superficiality of a game much quicker than an average player would. They're not wowed by the graphics so easily, they see a game and go "I get it. Like Quake but with bigger map files." or "Oh, neat. They put a GUI on a random number generator and called it a game."
Linux users would be gamers if people created games at the caliber they need.
I absolutely despise that "illegal" is almost always used in reference to file sharing. No one words other activities that way, such as illegal retailing. People need to start applying the descriptor to the appropriate specific activity, not to the activity as a whole. Stop calling it "illegal file sharing", refer to it as "illegally distributing copyrighted works" if you must, but don't word it in such a way as to marginalize file sharing as a concept.
Some people might this this is nitpicking, but I do think that the way we phrase the activity shapes the public perception. Lobbyists just want to beat it into everyone's head that file sharing itself is illegal, but it's not, and shouldn't be thought of as such.
I previously felt an obligation to inform the misinformed about a variety of topics. I've decided that the average person cannot be informed, they outright reject facts, evidence, and are almost incapable of critical thought. How the hell are you supposed to inform someone who rebuts with "yes, but the bible says..." or they start telling you about how they feel or what they "believe", when you thought you were discussing facts.
I became disenchanted over the last 8 years or so, as we were able to watch videos side-by-side of a politician stating "I stabbed a dog in the heart." and then a second video stating "I've never stabbed a dog." and then some member of the public is questioned about what they saw and they don't even recognize that conflicting statements were made. Then an "expert" begins discussing the two statements and is somehow able to reconcile completely contradictory statements into a seamless truth. It's like we're not observing the same reality. Of course since reality is a mental construct, it's true in some respect that we're not observing the same reality. And if we're not even in the same reality, how the hell can I possibly inform them of the laws and theories that govern the reality I'm in? I live in a world with gravity, evolution, electro-magnetism, chemical reactions, thermodynamics... they live in a world of magic, "truth", and gravity pulls down because that's how it feels today, and universes that pop-up out of nowhere because we live in a world designed like a video game.
And what's so weird is that I'm not even a skeptic. I like to believe I'm pretty open-minded. If any of my knowledge comes into question, I'm ready at the drop of a hat to re-examine things and see where I stand.
I guess I'm at the point now where I don't care if people like Bush ever acquire something approaching intellect. They can stay stupid for the rest of their stupid lives.
Yes, aggregate news. I don't have a problem with that. A video from a year ago isn't news. If something new happened with TED, that would be news, but an alert that somebody found a video on their site that they liked isn't news. I don't need to be updated every time someone reaches into the archives of a web site and finds an interesting article. It's not that/. should be "pure", it's that it should at least be news.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's exactly fair to make a crack at the competence level of Ubuntu users. I've used a large number of Linux distros. Arch, Arc, Slackware, Mandrake, Mandriva, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, Debian, Pyrolinux, Goblinx, DSL, and I'm sure a dozen others.
I happen to like Ubuntu. I can compile from source if I want, and as a programmer I'm no stranger to the CLI. i don't know why your friend can't compile from source, all an Ubuntu user has to do for most cases is install the build-essential package.
I'd like to spend more time using my computer than administrating it. I fall completely in line with Jef Raskin's philosophies. The computer is the tool I use to accomplish tasks. The computer is to information as a toaster is to toast. One shouldn't need any understanding of electrical engineering to have breakfast. If that's your thing, enjoy it, but the rest of the world's breakfast isn't any lesser because they don't truly know how their toaster works.
I didn't say harder, I said more convenient.
I was sort of interested in helping them boost the download stats, but due to the mismanagement of this event I've mostly lost interest. When I woke up this morning I expected it to be available but it wasn't. By 10am there was still no real official word as to when this whole shindig was supposed to take place. If you're going to have an event, it would be good to give people advance notice as to when it begins. I didn't even know when it starts until 45 minutes after it began. Now trying to download, it's obvious they weren't even prepared for it because the page is down.
Because I'm using Linux (Ubuntu) it's more convenient for me to wait until the most recent version is in the repositories, I'm not going to sit around and hope their download page starts working.
You mean they sent operatives back in time to create the company before the warning documentary was filmed?
I agree with you that the claims by Iron Port are highly suspect. They determined online pharmacies have a 100% error rate? I know people who have ordered from online pharmacies, chemically tested their drugs, and got exactly what they ordered. Obviously I can only speak of the handful of incidents I'm aware of, so maybe the people I know just got real lucky.
If online pharmacies screwed people 100% of the time, nobody at all would buy from them, because in a game like that the big money is in repeat orders. It wouldn't make any economic sense to score some petty cash with a bunch of first time orders when you can milk the same cow 100 times.
I'm not advocating the use of these pharmacies, I just don't think Iron Port's report is credible. To believe them means that online pharmacies never ship the correct order, and anything which makes an "always" or "never" claim raises red flags and requires close scrutiny.
I completely disagree. Leadership requires specialization in its own areas of knowledge, most of which can be summed up under the label of metacognition. Surrounding oneself with well-informed advisors only requires you be able to reliably gauge other people's metacognitive ability. If you're not the best at x, you need to know someone who's the best at x, and if you don't, all you need to know is someone who can tell you who the best at x is. If you're wrong, the process has a very fast feedback loop because your critics will quickly illuminate you on how routinely poor your decisions and appointees are.
Of course that assumes you don't insulate yourself with sycophants which makes the entire process a moot point because an egotistical person who's only interested in hearing good things about himself really has no interest in being a good leader anyway, only in hearing that he's a good leader.
After enough failed ventures, all those little failures start to add up. Someday it'll dawn on them they're in Bankruptcy/Reorganization mode. They can only dawdle so long before there's really nothing left for them to do but close the doors. It wasn't so long ago that nobody imagined IBM, SGI, or Sun Microsystems would ever have any trouble. The problem with having a big company is that you passively bleed out your resources faster than a small company would. It requires big successes just to maintain the current size. If they don't choose a direction soon, they're going to stop making any gains at all and shareholders will not be happy about it.
Even if the profit margin isn't greater than 50% (or 20% on other products), they still gain market share or at least an opportunity to retain a significant portion of their market share.
The reason good data is hard to find online is chiefly a problem with perspective and the models we are using to differentiate good data from bad data. That model primarily relies on the idea that it's all about numbers, or simply that more data is the same as better data. Whenever we come up with bad data, the "quantity model" dictates we just need a larger sample.
This model is directly related to how companies measure TV show quality. The theory is, the more people who watch a show, the better that show must be. This model is so obviously faulty; almost everyone can agree that American Idol isn't even in the same qualitative ballpark as The X-Files, Arrested Development, or Star Trek. The reason the model is faulty is because of the hugely limited scope of the examination. There are a number of variable factors that aren't being considered, such as people own more TVs than when Star Trek was on, and they're mistaking curios interest with enjoyment. Average person will stop and watch a car wreck for roughly the same amount of time they'll play with a yo-yo, that doesn't mean the entertainment value of each is directly comparable, there's a whole different brain process going on in the observers of each, but the model of measuring quantities assumes that two activities which consume the same amount of time are equivalent in all ways.
Back to internet statistics. All this data mining and gathering is designed to ignore the differences in activities, it's only cataloging information for the purpose of what's the same. As the article states, Alexa is always checking for biases. Well the biggest bias in this model is the assumption "in sufficient quantity, all things are interchangeable." It's the assumption that telemarketers and scammers work on, which is why so many people go broke buying into those schemes, because they buy into an assumption which is absolutely wrong.
Many internet business models, specifically data miners, are designed on, assume that 1 million hits is the same regardless of where it comes from. When you consider real factors, having 1 million people see your hand-made chain pouches at a shopping mall is not going to generate the same level of interest as having 1 million people see them at a renaissance fair.
Of course that introduces a whole different problem with assumptions about targeting (I'm not going to get into that, only state that targeted marketing makes the assumption that timing doesn't matter).
In conclusion, you can't play people as a numbers games, People's behaviors (including their online behaviors) are complex and any model which treats people's differences as a child might divide up a bag of skittles by color is going to have a very high error rate.
Downloaded is only less convenient if you don't have to worry about resources being unavailable when you want them. If YouTube, Veoh, et. al. goes down for maintenance or other reasons, videos are unavailable. Flash video compared to downloaded video is like comparing on-demand movie channels to DVDs. Yes, it would be nice if the videos you wanted were perpetually available on-demand. Unfortunately the availability of video content is at the provider's whim. When sites like NBC decide to publish content, whether or not I can watch it at any given moment is not up to me, an episode they provided yesterday they can remove today. I don't necessarily download for higher quality, I download to secure resources for when I want to use them, and use them in the way I want. With flash video, what controls are available to a video is up to the content provider. If they decide a video can't be paused, played in slow motion, or sped up, there's nothing to be done about that.
Bittorrent is nice, but the epitome of inconvenience. It's great for popular resources, but it can be miserable and downright impossible to get something which only a small number of people are interested in.
No, I was hasty when posting to digg that I was looking forward to 2018. Upon further thought, I've decided it'll be at least 2050 before computers will change in any significant way. My main concern is that the content and models of the internet aren't advancing nearly as rapidly as the computer resources powering them. The power of our computers are leaps and bounds ahead of 1998. And with all this power the main distractions seem to be "casual games" (rehashed ATARI or NES games) and viral videos (read: any stupid thing anyone has ever done, but recorded for distribution). It's to be expected I guess. Give 1000 people Star Trek technology and you'll have a line of 999 people outside the holodeck trying to live their ultimate sexual fantasy.If people had told me 10 years ago that this was about as far as we'd get with the internet in a decade, I really wouldn't have believed them. As much as I hear about all the huge advances in technology, I always ponder the 320x240 pixelated screens of YouTube and remember that it's what people consider 10 years more advanced than what we had in 1998. And in 1998 we had VRML with people announcing that we were on the verge of the internet being a 3-Dimensional landscape. We also had 320x240 pixelated video, but I thought that was just temporary. I remember watching South Park on RealPlayer G2. Now instead of it being an application, it's even more pixelated and embedded directly in a web page, just in case downloading content was too convenient. Flickr's progress has been to strip down the size and length of videos. I can't wait for 2050. By then, we'll have reduced clips down to 3 seconds that you can only watch in a 16x16 thumbnail. And as the "Web M" Trend (It won't be hip to use numbers anymore for internet "versions"), all the coolest companies won't have any vowels at all. Hooray progress!
This crap has to come to a halt. Not just Comcast's antics, but ISPs in general. If an ISP is going to block ports, traffic shape, or otherwise impose restrictions on internet connections, they should be required to advertise those restrictions more prominently than the features of the service. It's not right to bury restrictions on page 30 of a TOS agreement. If you're going to advertise your service as 50 times faster than a dial-up connection or advertise "blazing speeds" and low prices, they should also be required to advertise their service's restrictions just as prominently or more so. The same thing goes for "unlimited bandwidth". If they're going to advertise unlimited bandwidth, they should never be able to cite excessive usage as a reason to cut someone off. Our world should not be run by marketing and PR people. "Liar" should not be a viable career path.
It was nothing but a bunch of softball questions answered with corporately loyal rhetoric. The whole thing can be summed up:
He was a blogger for Microsoft and whose job it was to report news about Windows Vista's superior functionality. Every experience he had was great, challenging, and emotionally rewarding.
I don't like spin, and that's all this "interview" is. I'm not in the market for any bridges or swampland.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap. However, when that same population is scoured for the resources to oppress them the method pays for itself. Keeping the Chinese population ignorant of their government's workings keeps the wheels turning.
Imagine keeping a worker in a basement turning a wheel that powers your house. If you use the energy he generates to power a lock on the door, and use a portion of that power to keep him from getting any information on how to quit working, the system pays for itself.
The Chinese people make incredible innovations, their labors lead to powerful technological developments. Those technologies are then used to keep the Chinese people from escaping their societal prison.
I don't deny that Generation Y workers can provide value. The question is whether that value outweighs the detriments. The overwhelming sentiment among them is that "I won't be loyal to a company because it won't be loyal to me." or restated as "Me first." The problem I see with that attitude is that they project their own disloyalties onto the company. They're job hopping because they assume the company will dump them.
They can't understand that a company will actually be loyal to them because they don't stay long enough to enjoy having seniority. An entire career built around perpetually being "The New Guy". A good company will be loyal to you, especially for specialized skilled workers. The people who get screwed out of companies are (usually) middle management as their job functions often become blurred and overlaps with the administrative duties of top-tier production workers (For example, Project Leader vs. Lead Programmer). Engineers, developers, technicians, and any sort of production workers are usually the last ones to lose their job and that's only if the company is truly in dire straits.
Look at people like Andrew Koenig, Barbara E. Moo, Bjarne Stroustrup, and John Carmack. They've been loyal to their companies and the companies have rewarded them handsomely for it, allowing them to work with virtually any technology they want to. As a counter-example, look at John Romero. Brilliant guy, but his lack of loyalty and over-confidence in his abilities lead to failure. And that's where I see the majority of Generation Y workers headed, careers like John Romero's, except without ever hitting the high note. What a Generation Y worker "could" do or "might" bring to a company is meaningless if they're going to leave for a different company before any of it comes to fruition.
Generation Y workers have the potential to bring valuable ideas and contributions to a company, but they need to temper those ideas with a traditional work ethic so some of that potential turns into real value.
I wish it were just that DUIs were being documented and prosecuted more, but that's a fantasy. The numbers of crooked cops have not fallen, people today bribe their way out of tickets just as much as they have in the past. People of my generation didn't drink and drive. Growing up during the MADD era, we learned to call a cab. These days, drinking and driving among youth is a cool thing to do. They want to be like Paris Hilton. They do it because it's a peer thing, everyone else their age is doing it. People aren't getting prosecuted more, the bulk of the prison population are babyboomers. The most unfortunate thing is that Generation Y drinks and drives because there's few consequences for it. They brag about how they got a couple of points on their license, but that doesn't actually stop them.
Are you seriously saying you feel some sort of entitlement to drink and drive? You're just annoyed that previous generations were able to evade the legal consequences? Thanks, I think you exemplify everything I said about your generation. Entitlement indeed.
I don't think the feelings of entitlement have anything to do with living through an economic crunch, which isn't that bad for Generation Y yet, and they certainly weren't raised in an economically disadvantaged world, they had more financial resources available to them than any previous generation. A recession is only beginning, and while they were busy setting up blogs they never considered what they could do to help the situation. They just think it's a problem for older people to fix, even though they're fully into adulthood now they still don't want to take an active role in fixing the problem.
The sense of entitlement I refer to has a lot to do with iPhones, laptops, and new cars. The latest greatest gadget is the bare minimum entrance fee. Young people today don't buy used cars, used cellphones, or used anything. It's gotta be top-notch and brand new. They don't buy replacement gadgets for broken ones, because they'll buy a new one long before their previous model breaks. A recent article written by Generation Y about frugal living involves $100 jeans and shopping at brand outlets.
I live in an apartment complex that's largely used for college housing, but I don't see anyone living like they're suffering financially. New cars, new clothes, stereo systems that take up an entire 12 foot wall, all while not being able to pay their rent or cover next semester's tuition.
Young people today are getting married before they even move out of their parents house. Married couples that don't even live together. And, in spite of abundant sex education, they're giving birth to their own children long before they ever think about a job or career. They think "parent" is a career path and don't know why the money isn't rushing in from their blog.
The latest Ivy League graduates are turning their diplomas into napkins as fast as the schools can issue them. Established professional companies don't like job hoppers, but Millenials don't want to work somewhere, they want to live a nomad lifestyle where they work as necessary, then quit their job to blog in a coffee bar, then try to find another job and wonder why no one will hire them even though they don't stay more than 6 months.
They feel entitled to show the world how drunk they can get, and then are completely perplexed when that racy Facebook photo bites them in the ass. It's no different than when someone before the internet would make a public spectacle of themselves at a bar and lose their job.
It's my belief it all stems from a childhood of "Everyone's Special, Everyone Wins". As children, they were imbued with too much self-esteem, which now has become narcissism.
Obviously there will be exceptions, but those are the generational traits, which are not the same as racial traits, because they can change their attitudes and behaviors. But they behave this way because it's emotionally rewarding for them.
Generations don't label themselves. You get labeled and usually that label is based on the most widespread opinions about the members of said generation. Generation Y, Millenials, Generation Me... for over 150 years there's never been a clear distinction between one generation and the next. And you're not the first generation to be given a label you don't want. Generation labels have almost always been a derogatory term. Funny thing is that each generation does have certain characteristics. Like with Generation Me/Y/Millenials... an overwhelming sense of entitlement. Faster than anyone else, they get really annoyed when the world doesn't morph itself to meet their whims. Consider the large number of people from your generation who play games and think that team killing is fun. They do it because THEY want to have fun, everyone else be damned because "Me" is all that's important. If they submit an article to Slashdot/Digg/Fark, they're infinitely annoyed if their article isn't chosen, somehow they feel entitled to be heard. This extends to blogs, they created them because they believe everything they think should be published material. They have unprecedented numbers of drunk drivers because they don't care who they endanger, all that matters is that "Me" has fun, They think every luxury in life is a right not a privilege. And they're annoyed that "Me" doesn't get to pick the generation label applied to them. If you join a voice chat with them, they're known to just sit there and sing loudly ignoring that there's 10 other people who actually don't want to hear their rendition of the latest emo band. Their greatest ideas for the application of the internet was to get everyone swept up in an endless series of popularity contests. Egocentricity is the core concept for the "Social Web". Thanks for that. Consider this term was applied to your generation because you have people like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Kevin Federline, and Lindsey Lohan as your spokespeople.
I've written a lot of code in my time. I've never written a routine/method/function that saved user account names and passwords then emailed them to myself. Writing passwords to the local system is fine, but even that you have to do correctly (in a sufficiently encrypted form) and you must notify the user. I can't understand how he could possibly justify creating emails that transmit password information as simply a debugging accident. The debugging process probably shouldn't involve automatically creating emails. And if it does, it probably shouldn't include secure information. And if it does, it probably shouldn't include secure information from the user without notifying them.
I don't think this can be justified. You can't "accidentally" harvest account names and passwords. Bells go off in the head when you're writing code that says "create an email, send it to this address, and include the current user's username and password."
From my observations, the main reason Linux users aren't gaming is because they're very smart. They're not easily entertained. They quickly break games down mentally into it broad groups of actions (even if subconsciously) and the repetitive nature of modern games becomes a thorn in their side very quickly. They want real tools to interact with game worlds, not the illusion of power. As an example, in most modern MMOs, characters get weaker every time they gain a level (I'm not referencing a specific game here). At first level, you can kill something the same level as you in a few seconds. At 20th level it takes 2 minutes to kill a creature the same level as you. At 100th level it takes 10 minutes to kill something equal to your level. The fact that your abilities are labeled "Super Fireball IV" or "Giant Axe Chop VII" doesn't mask the fact that even if you're doing more numbered damage, the creatures have higher health relative to your ability, giving the feeling of actually getting weaker as the game tries to maintain the illusion of power with higher numbers and bigger explosions. When that's coupled with the repetitive nature of the game, in that every battle comes down to using the same abilities in the same order, it's not really a game so much as a finger exercise and it's about as fun as a typing tutor. Ignoring MMOs, we have FPS games which haven't progressed any since Quake 1. Graphically, they're superior. Functionally they're the same. A bunch of identical people running around with really big guns. Network latency plays a huge role in FPS games, but it doesn't have to. If there were more strategic elements to the game the emphasis on split-second timing would be dramatically reduced. Intelligent people want more tools to interact with the world. They want their actions to alter the game environment. Blow a hole through a wall, deform the terrain with explosions, knock down trees... that's not even the most basic list of what a player should be able to do in a 3D game. More damage, more muscular characters, bigger armor, larger explosions, and better graphics are all surface improvements over the previous generation of games. They raise the initial impression of a game, maybe sells more units, but they don't add replay value to a game. Intelligent people play a game repeatedly when it has something to offer them in terms of intellectual discovery. Finding new ways to use spells, equipment, and character abilities, interesting interactions with the games physics, those are things that appeal to players in the long term. Linux users have a way of seeing through the superficiality of a game much quicker than an average player would. They're not wowed by the graphics so easily, they see a game and go "I get it. Like Quake but with bigger map files." or "Oh, neat. They put a GUI on a random number generator and called it a game." Linux users would be gamers if people created games at the caliber they need.
That sounds just like something Tobias would say. You sure stuck your johnson in your mouth that time.
I absolutely despise that "illegal" is almost always used in reference to file sharing. No one words other activities that way, such as illegal retailing. People need to start applying the descriptor to the appropriate specific activity, not to the activity as a whole. Stop calling it "illegal file sharing", refer to it as "illegally distributing copyrighted works" if you must, but don't word it in such a way as to marginalize file sharing as a concept. Some people might this this is nitpicking, but I do think that the way we phrase the activity shapes the public perception. Lobbyists just want to beat it into everyone's head that file sharing itself is illegal, but it's not, and shouldn't be thought of as such.
I previously felt an obligation to inform the misinformed about a variety of topics. I've decided that the average person cannot be informed, they outright reject facts, evidence, and are almost incapable of critical thought. How the hell are you supposed to inform someone who rebuts with "yes, but the bible says..." or they start telling you about how they feel or what they "believe", when you thought you were discussing facts.
I became disenchanted over the last 8 years or so, as we were able to watch videos side-by-side of a politician stating "I stabbed a dog in the heart." and then a second video stating "I've never stabbed a dog." and then some member of the public is questioned about what they saw and they don't even recognize that conflicting statements were made. Then an "expert" begins discussing the two statements and is somehow able to reconcile completely contradictory statements into a seamless truth. It's like we're not observing the same reality. Of course since reality is a mental construct, it's true in some respect that we're not observing the same reality. And if we're not even in the same reality, how the hell can I possibly inform them of the laws and theories that govern the reality I'm in? I live in a world with gravity, evolution, electro-magnetism, chemical reactions, thermodynamics... they live in a world of magic, "truth", and gravity pulls down because that's how it feels today, and universes that pop-up out of nowhere because we live in a world designed like a video game.
And what's so weird is that I'm not even a skeptic. I like to believe I'm pretty open-minded. If any of my knowledge comes into question, I'm ready at the drop of a hat to re-examine things and see where I stand.
I guess I'm at the point now where I don't care if people like Bush ever acquire something approaching intellect. They can stay stupid for the rest of their stupid lives.
Yes, aggregate news. I don't have a problem with that. A video from a year ago isn't news. If something new happened with TED, that would be news, but an alert that somebody found a video on their site that they liked isn't news. I don't need to be updated every time someone reaches into the archives of a web site and finds an interesting article. It's not that /. should be "pure", it's that it should at least be news.